The first thing Adrian noticed was silence.Not the absence of sound, alarms still screamed somewhere distant, boots still thundered through corridors, but the silence inside his head. The constant pressure, the low hum of something watching him think, had vanished.That terrified him more than Cipher ever had.He lay still for two breaths longer than necessary, eyes closed, cataloging sensations the way he’d been trained to. Concrete beneath his spine. Heat from a nearby fire licking the air. The copper sting of blood at the back of his throat. Real pain. Real weight. Real time.When he finally opened his eyes, the world didn’t glitch.That confirmed it. He was out.Or at least… out enough.Mara crouched beside him, one knee on the floor, rifle angled down the corridor. The red emergency lights carved sharp shadows across her face, older than the woman he’d seen on the feeds, harder, scarred in places no simulation ever bothered to render accurately.“You’re back,” she said without l

The siren wasn’t coming from above.Adrian realized that first.It wasn’t an alarm meant for people. It was too low, too rhythmic, a vibration that crawled along the spine rather than pierced the ears. It rose from beneath the concrete, from below the levels Cipher claimed didn’t exist.Mara stopped short at the junction, one hand raised. The corridor lights flickered, then steadied into a sickly amber.“That’s not a pursuit alert,” Lorenzo muttered, pushing himself upright despite the limp he refused to acknowledge. “That’s a summons.”Adrian felt it answering something inside him. Not pain. Not fear.Recognition.“Cipher’s falling back,” Adrian said quietly. “That signal isn’t defensive. It’s… archival.”Mara glanced at him sharply. “You’re sure?”“I don’t need to be,” he replied. “My nervous system already made the decision.”She didn’t like that, but she didn’t waste time arguing. She keyed open the service hatch at her feet and dropped into darkness without hesitation. Adrian fol

Silence hit harder than the explosions ever did.Not the clean kind. Not peace. This was the silence that followed systems tearing themselves apart faster than sound could keep up. The kind that pressed against Adrian’s skull until his thoughts felt too loud to belong to him.The evacuation tunnel trembled.Dust sifted from the ceiling in slow, drifting sheets as emergency lights flickered between red and nothing. Somewhere behind them, Cipher’s lower infrastructure was still collapsing, but the sound had become distant, muted, as if reality itself was pulling away from what had happened.Adrian leaned against the tunnel wall, ribs burning, head still ringing from the reset shock Mara had triggered. Every nerve felt stretched thin, like he’d been pulled through too many versions of himself and hadn’t settled back into one yet.Lorenzo sat on the floor across from him, back against the concrete, elbows braced on his knees. His hands were shaking. Not violently. Precisely enough to noti

The gunfire didn’t stop.It only faded, muffled, distorted, as if the world on the other side of the wall belonged to a different frequency entirely.Adrian moved first.Mara followed without hesitation, one hand gripping Lorenzo’s collar as she dragged him, half-conscious and bleeding, through the smoke-choked hallway. The emergency lights overhead flickered like dying heartbeat monitors, painting everything in violent slices of red and black.“Left,” Mara ordered.Adrian didn’t question her. She seemed to know this place better than the Architect, better than Cipher, better than him. Her footsteps hit the ground with the confidence of someone who had mapped every blind corner in blood.They turned.The hallway stretched unnaturally long, far longer than the blueprints Adrian had stolen months ago. The architecture was wrong. Corners folded in on themselves. Floors sloped at angles that defied the human eye.This wasn’t Cipher’s facility.This was something older.A layer beneath the

The corridor stopped shaking long before Adrian’s hands did.He kept one palm braced against the wall as he moved, the other gripping the pistol Mara had shoved into his hands moments earlier. The sirens had died. The lights had steadied. But the silence that followed felt wrong, unnatural, like a breath held too long.Mara walked a few steps ahead of him, steady, focused, carrying none of the exhaustion he felt. Lorenzo staggered behind them, half-conscious but mobile enough to follow, one hand pressed against the wall, the other curled protectively against his side.“Up ahead,” Mara whispered.Adrian didn’t ask how she knew. The woman moved through Cipher’s collapsing labyrinth like someone walking through memory instead of metal.The passage bent sharply, leading them into a long hall lined with reinforced blast doors. Each door was labeled with stark alphabetical codes—Q12, S14, X03—names that meant nothing to anyone except the ones who built this place.Or the ones raised for it.